On Sunday 03 November 2002 03:09 am, Dimitrie O. Paun wrote:
On November 3, 2002 02:35 am, Francois Gouget wrote:
Too much nesting just hides information and forces the user to dig down to find what he is looking for.
I am sorry to do a AOL -- me too post, but I do agree 100% with Francois. For WineHQ, I _strongly_ feel it's a big mistake to have more than 2 levels of menus. Just top level, and a sublevel is more than enough.
Here are the principles I used for my proposal:
- Just two levels
- The more some info is accessed, the fewer mouse clicks should be required to get to it.
- Menus organized by usage patterns, rather then strict technical category.
I agree with the first two, but the third is wrong. Information should not be split up into illogical categories based on what you think is a logical usage pattern. The fewer splits you can make, the better it is. If I'm looking for a FAQ, I would first click on Documentation, but if it's buried in "Support" I would not even bother clicking there. The best structure would have clear, logical categories and you would not have to guess where a certain document would be buried. Keep in mind that it is better to group all information into as few logical categories as possible. There should be no guessing involved.
[snip]
And a comment on usage patterns. You asked why the split between Development/Contributing, and Support/Documentation. This follows from Principle 3. They have _very_ different usage patterns, and audiences.
How about renaming support to "Get Help", Troubleshooting", or something like that. "Support" != self-help, and as a user, I would click on "Documentation" first. Support implies commercial support, and I would think (from experience with many other websites) that it would simply be a plug for Codeweavers, not an area with documentation.
Similarly, for the Development/Contributing. Time and again OSS project push only the "Development" part in front, scarring away non-programmers from contributing, just to realize later on that they do need a lot of non-programming help as well. Case in point, instead of spending my time on the controls, I do other things that could be handled by non-programmers :). It's a natural split, the Development area is very important for Wine, and people going there are not interested in items that are listed in "Contributing"; also, we should show people there are many other ways to contribute, appart from coding. BTW, the Contributing section is is Francois idea, but I strongly support it.
OK, this section needs to be renamed, too. 'contribute' is a transitive verb, and in a context of a free software project implies contributing code. A web guru would never click on a "contribute" link because they think it's instructions for sending in Wine patches. "Help out" or "Volunteer" or something like that would be much more accurate.
Thing is, I am quite happy with the structure I put forward. Please review my desing principles, and lets see if we have any disagreement there. You must realize this is UI design, and everybody will have a different opinion. :) (So I must have mine)